May 1, 2017

Aparna Systems (www.aparnasystems.com), innovator in data center design, just unveiled its first products during the NFV World Congress 2017. At the genesis of their solution, NVMe considered as a radical approach that fuels a real change in the data center that invites inventors for a new design of servers with hyper dense compute, storage and networking building block. The company is financially supported by Divergent Venture Partners, Clearstone Partners, Kumar Malavalli, Founder of Brocade, and a few others.

Arpana promotes a new Cloud-in-a-Box approach and designs a new hyper dense server in 4U named Orca µCloud available in two models: 4060 and 4015 respectively equipped with 60 Orca µservers and 15 µServers. Each µCloud offers a dual active/active 20Gbps per µServer. Each µServer, with a size of a 3.5 HDD, exists in two flavors: Oserv8 with 8 or Oserv16 with 16 cores based on Intel Broadwell Xeon CPUs and SATA at 12Gbps or NVMe at 64Gbps. The latency is 100 µs for the Oserv8 and 10 µs for the Oserv16. Each µServer has 8TB SATA drives so a total of 120TB or 480TB if you consider 4015 or 4060 µCloud models. Globally in one rack, Arpana is able to offer 9,600 cores and close to 5PB, pretty impressive in a very small footprint. For the 4015, the price starts at $49,500.
It's a very interesting approach for service providers and enterprise applications, we'll see in the next few months how things evolve and how competition will react.